“I haven’t been well. I’ve been having some problems. My days have been full of problems.” Etta seemed determined to avoid eye contact. I watched as a leaf over her right shoulder let go of its branch and lazily spun down towards the surface of the stream. Her arm shot out like a mongoose and she snatched it out of the air.
“Here,” she said, and she stood up and turned around and stuck it behind my ear. She gave the impression of smiling intensely, almost freakily, but it was all in the set of her chin and the lines around her eyes. I didn’t really have a response to this. I wished she would sit back down.
“Uh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I told her. “What…what kinds of problems?”
“You know. The kind that mess you up.” She tapped the ember of her cigarette onto the carpet of brown pine needles and I ground it out with my foot. “Problems with the Man. I’m a wanted fugitive. Did you know that?”
“This isn’t really how I imagined our ten-year reunion,” I said. “We’re supposed to be trying to out-bullshit each other. I tell you that my four year old just tested into his preschool’s gifted program, you tell me about your recent promotion to Assistant Supervisor of Cell Phone Sales and CEO Fast-Tracking. Also, it should be indoors.”
“Also, there should be about a hundred and fifty more people.”
“Not necessarily. I’m okay with this many.” She came pretty close to a smile at that. Somewhat close.
“Ask me about the fugitive part,” she said, turning back to watch the stream.
I looked at my watch. It was 7:33 in the evening and the sun was teetering on the edge of South Mountain. Great golden shafts of light streamed down, gilding the hemlocks. A quiet breeze raised the hairs of my forearms – the chilly, resigned exhalation of the mountain. Half a mile away frogs were having sex. If only it would make the occasional effort, I thought, the world could be a halfway decent place to live.
“Okay, tell me about the fugitive part.”
She sat back down and this time I sat down beside her. I handed her a broken pine branch and she used it to tickle the water.
“No, I was making that up,” she said. “I was trying to out-bullshit you.” She sucked at her cigarette and pushed up her glasses. “I only wish I was a fugitive. I kind of feel like I’ve missed my chance to really fuck some shit up, and soon I’ll be thirty and no one will take me seriously anymore. Like, I’ll try to join a radical animal liberation terrorist cell and all the kids will think I’m a narc.”
“No one will think you’re a narc. They don’t even have narcs anymore. If they want to find out if you’re going to blow up a pharmaceutical plant, they just listen to your phone calls.” I shifted uncomfortably. I felt like I was missing the point.
“You’re missing the point,” Etta said. “Listen, I remember when we were like eight and your dad got his pants caught in the harvester, and you missed school for two weeks and our whole class put our lunch money in a pretzel bin to buy flowers for the funeral. And I came over to your house and we were going to go play in the garage and your mom was in there just kind of staring at all those canvases that he started painting and didn’t ever finish. And then we went out behind the grain silo instead.”
It was true. We went out behind the grain silo instead. Etta kissed me out behind the grain silo, I now realize, because she didn’t know anything better to do. I threw a corncob at her.
“I get it,” I said. “But you’re not going to get killed by a harvester. Look, you’ve done a lot of things with your life. You’re twenty-eight. I heard that you worked as the only female rodeo clown in Arizona for a while. That’s something.”
She stood up, sighed, chucked the pine branch into the stream. A congregation of startled crayfish exploded away from it in a burst of mud. She looked down at me. A halo of milkweed spores illuminated her from behind. When she spoke she sounded like the angel of bad news.
“You’ve changed,” she said. She had me there.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“Don’t say, ‘I couldn’t help it,’” she said.
“I wasn’t going to,” I said. But I had been thinking about it.
“I shouldn’t be so surprised. I just, I don’t know, I thought we’d go rob banks together. I have no idea what comes next,” she said, “and I’m scared, okay, I’ll admit that, I’m pretty scared. Pretty terrified. Got it?”
“Um.” I was still sitting down and my butt was getting wet. “Do you want a ride back to town?”
“Forget it,” she said. “I’m going to go get eaten by wolves. Do they have wolves here? Mountain lions? Deer? I guess they all got run over.” She strode forward into the stream, splashing water all over my trousers. “Something better get me,” she said, without turning back, when she was halfway across.
I watched her cross the stream and disappear among the skirts of the hemlocks, her bearing fixed on the ridge of South Mountain. What could I do? The most I could hope for was to ruin my shoes. I have never been good at helping people with their problems.
The sun was gone for good. Fifteen miles to the south, under a humming yellow lamp, my mother was waiting up for me on the porch of our old house. She was drifting off to sleep, and she needed someone to wake her up and take her inside and play a few hands of gin rummy with her and put her to bed. I got up, brushed off my damp trousers, and followed the path back up the bank to the parking lot.
The year was 1962, the place was Schenectady. I’d been working in pest control by day and shacking up with an alcoholic dancer named Pauline by night. In my pocket I carried a tiny notebook in which I placed a tally mark every time she didn’t respond to something I said.
I was on my second notebook by the time I got assigned to the Coleman place. Vince, my dispatcher, told me to bring four tanks of imiprothrin, a pair of galoshes, and a cyanide capsule, just in case. Randy lived over on the eastern edge of the city, in a rathole flat above a 24-hour pawn shop called Make Or Break’s. I meant to knock twice, but he swung open the door after only one.
In those days Randy looked nothing like he does today. His most notable characteristics were his dreaming, unassuming eyes and his painfully twisted back – a deformity attributed to a childhood bout with scoliosis, which would be suddenly and miraculously healed years later following a mushroom trip in the Himalayas.
He was cleanshaven, which I found odd, considering the bohemian trappings of his apartment. On an easel in the corner rested a canvas draped with a cloth, in which holes had been cut such that only very small portions of the painting underneath were visible at any given time. Candle butts were melted into the ceiling and the walls. In the kitchen I found a hifi stereo with an axe through it.
After a cursory inspection of the apartment turned up no infestation, I asked Randy for more details as to the specific nature and location of his pests. A rambling, near-incoherent monologue-cum-rant followed, by the end of which I was forced to conclude that the creatures plaguing this man were in reality the hallucinatory manifestations of the dozens of pieces of music gestating in his mind at the moment. I sat on a wooden milk crate while he described them to me, his eyes tracking them around the room: a bat-winged myna bird screeching from atop the doorjamb, a blue cat with six legs scurrying under the armoire.
It was hours before I left, retracing my steps through the snowy streets, lugging the imiprothrin back to the pest control offices. Stray dogs padded past without looking at me, yellow in the sodium lamps. When I arrived home, dawn was melting over the horizon and Pauline was gone. She’d taken my wallet and my record collection.
